It means they were a message in themselves. Many people could not read or write, and they used to teach line by line, and so get the message into the hearts of those who found the Lord.
Will you turn with me to the prophecy of Isaiah, Chapter 62? Isaiah, Chapter 62. I will read from Verse 1.
For Zion’s sake will I not hold My peace,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
until her righteousness go forth as brightness,
and her salvation as a lamp that burneth.And the nations shall see thy righteousness,
and all kings thy glory;
and thou shalt be called by a new name,
which the mouth of the Lord shall name.Thou shalt also be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
and a royal diadem in the hand of thy God.Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken;
neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate:
but thou shalt be called Hephzibah,
and thy land Beulah;
for the Lord delighteth in thee,
and thy land shall be married.For as a young man marrieth a virgin,
so shall thy sons marry thee;
and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride,
so shall thy God rejoice over thee.I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem;
they shall never hold their peace day nor night:
ye that are the Lord’s remembrancers, take ye no rest,
and give Him no rest,
till He establish,
and till He make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
Then, in the New Covenant, in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 18, Verses 19 and 20.
Again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father Who is in heaven.
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.
And then the letter of the apostle to the Ephesians, Chapter 6, from which this hymn was based.
Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Wherefore take up the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having done all, to stand.
Verse 17:
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God;
with all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit,
and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints,
and on my behalf, that utterance may be given unto me, in opening my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel.
Just a further word of prayer.
Beloved Lord, we want to thank You, as we are gathered here this afternoon in Your presence, that You are here. You are the One Who has asked us and invited us to come into Your presence.
And Lord, as we come to the ministry of Your Word, we want just to confess before You that without You we can do nothing—that is, nothing of eternal worth—without that anointing that You have provided.
To that end, beloved Lord, we stand by faith in that anointing of grace and power which You have so freely and fully provided for us, both for the speaking, for the translating, and, Lord, for our hearing.
So come upon this time, that it will live with Your presence, with Your speaking, and with Your working; and that out of it, Lord, there may be something more for Yourself in us all.
We ask it in the name of our Messiah, the Lord Jesus. Amen.
This afternoon session, I want to talk again about prayer and intercession. I said yesterday that this is a vast subject—enormous. In two sessions, we can only really touch on certain aspects of this enormous matter.
But I am trusting the Lord that He will enable us to touch those things which will be meaningful to us at the present juncture in which we are found as the people of God.
There is no higher calling to which God can call us than the ministry of intercession. I believe that this ministry of intercession is something so in the heart of our Lord that there is no ministry that exceeds it in value or significance.
Few people ever respond to this call. But it is my conviction—I may be wrong—that all those who occupy the top positions in God’s eternal government were all intercessors.
There is no other way to really come into the heart of God than through intercession. And God does the most extraordinary things with people to make them into intercessors.
I have often wondered if the apostle Paul did not become one of the greatest intercessors in the history of the church by being restrained by a chain and not able to preach in public any more.
Certainly Amy Carmichael became a great intercessor after the Lord put her on her back for nearly forty years of her very active life up to that point. And I have certainly wondered about our beloved brother Watchman, whether he did not fulfil a ministry of incredible power in imprisonment through the long years that he was in prison.
It is amazing to me, the lengths to which the Lord will go to bring a person to the place where they become an intercessor. For it is not only something to do with time and sense; it is something to do with eternity. It is the way the Lord prepares us for eternal position and eternal ministry.
I spoke yesterday afternoon about the power that there is in prayer. Of course, in prayer itself there is no power. The power is in the relationship to the Lord Jesus. That is where the power is.
Because prayer, and especially intercession, is a relationship to the Lord Jesus—moving with Him, being under His supervision, if you like, under His command—it is of tremendous importance and has tremendous power. It is the Lord Who has the power.
When we learn this very simple lesson, there are all kinds of things that can be touched once we are under the headship of the Lord Jesus, once we are under the command of the Lord Jesus by the Holy Spirit.
There is nothing that is impossible with the Lord: no situation that cannot be touched, no problem that cannot be solved, and no complex obstacle that cannot be overcome, once we learn to walk with the Lord and move with the Lord.
I spoke about the wide range of prayer. The range of prayer is amazing. It comes from simple, self-conscious, almost self-centred prayers—what I call “gimme” prayers: “I want; please give me this; please give me that. I need this. Please meet me here.” Or even such simple little prayers as, “Help!”
It ranges from that type of simple prayer to amazing prayers—the kind of prayers the apostle prayed when he said:
I pray that the spirit of wisdom and revelation be given to you,
the eyes of your hearts being enlightened,
that ye may know what is the hope of His calling,
and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe.
The range in prayer is tremendous: from that which is self-conscious, if not self-centred, to that which is selfless. It is a range that covers everything.
Then we talked about having the eyes of your hearts open to the fact that this world we live in is essentially a spiritual world.
I do not believe anybody sees the value in prayer. Prayer—the prayer meeting—is just a religious exercise, a very boring place indeed, until leadership and people, all of us together, begin to see that we are living in an essentially spiritual world.
The only way that things can be advanced in the work of the Lord, the only way the church can be built up, is when obstacles, problems, and enemy activity are dealt with in the place of prayer.
Once we begin to see that we wrestle not against flesh and blood, we understand that it is not just physical circumstances. They are spiritual circumstances. It is not just against physical human ideologies, philosophies, problems, or people that we are up against.
We wrestle against principalities, against powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against hosts of wicked spirits in the heavenly places. Once we begin to understand that, it is as if our eyes open and we suddenly realise that we are in touch with the throne.
When we recognise that, we also recognise that we have an amazing privilege given to us: access into the throne room of the universe, to the very throne of God Himself, the Most High Who rules in the affairs of men.
For any of you who are young, in your teens, who might be here this afternoon, just let me say one thing. I am very thankful to God that He got hold of me in this matter of prayer when I was thirteen years of age, shortly after I was saved.
My eyes opened to this invisible world, and I began to go to the prayer meeting—to the shock of some of the older folk in the fellowship, to see this young person there every week.
Somehow, to me, it was the most important meeting of the week. Of course, I did not know too much at that point about prayer; all that came later.
But do not think this is for old white-haired people just on the threshold of eternity. This matter of prayer is for you, however young you are.
If you will only start to put yourself at the disposal of the Lord in your teens, my, what the Lord can do in your life, and what understanding He can bring you into right from the beginning.
I want first of all to underline something that I just mentioned yesterday afternoon: intercession, which is the highest and most selfless form of prayer, is basically co-working together with the Lord.
It is not somehow battling with the Lord or wringing out of an unwilling God what He really does not want to do. It is not that if you go on long enough, He will finally say, “I have to do it.”
One gets the impression so often in prayer times that the Lord is really the antagonist, and that we are having to get the Lord into a corner where He will have to do something for us. If we only make enough noise, pray long enough and powerfully enough, and use the right words, finally the Lord will sort of say, “Well, I will have to do something; otherwise, I am going to get no peace from these people.”
That is a religious mentality, because that is exactly what we see in the religions of the world. The idea is that if we will only go on long enough—by prayer wheels, incense, rituals, prostrations, or whatever else—we will somehow win favour with God.
But real intercession is not wringing out of the Lord answers to requests that He does not really want to answer. It is knowing what is the will of the Lord and standing with the Lord for the fulfilment of His purpose.
I believe that will transform everything with us in the prayer time. We are soldiers, and we are actually under the command of the Commander-in-Chief. We are at His disposal.
He is, to put it in the old King James language, the Lord of hosts. In Hebrew, it is “Commander of the armies,” as simple as that. We are at His disposal, under His command.
He is the Commander-in-Chief, and He is leading us into this battle. We have to learn what His objectives are, what His goals are, and then be at His disposal, that we might come to the fulfilment of those objectives.
Let me put it yet another way. The Lord Jesus is the Intercessor. He ever lives to make intercession for us at the right hand of the Father.
Real intercession is when the Holy Spirit takes the burden that is upon the heart of our Lord Jesus at any given moment and, as it were, communicates it to us in our heart and in our spirit.
Then it becomes a burden in us which, in the end, finds its way out through our lips. It is an amazing thing. In this way, we are in fellowship with our Lord Jesus.
Now, if you look at that passage in Matthew, Chapter 18, I think it is quite clear. It says:
Again I say unto you, that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father Who is in heaven.
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.
I have heard many messages on the last verse: “Where two or three are gathered together, there am I in the midst of them.” I have heard it mentioned a thousand times in messages.
I have also heard messages on the other statement: “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them.” I have actually been in meetings where someone has said from the platform, “Can anyone agree with me on this thing?” Someone puts up a hand—“Hallelujah! Right, there are two of us.”
The idea immediately is that now God has to answer because two of His people have agreed. Because two of these people are actually in agreement, the Lord says, “This is a miracle. I will have to do something.”
Very few people ever see that the last sentence qualifies the first. Listen again:
If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father Who is in heaven; for where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.
That last sentence qualifies the first. It is the Lord in the midst of two or three gathered into His name by Whom this harmonising comes.
The word agree in Greek is sumphōneō, which is the word from which we get “symphony.” We could even put “harmonise.” If two of you should be harmonised.
The meaning of the whole thing surely is that it is the Lord in the midst of two or three members of His body Who gives rise to a harmony, a unity, in prayer. When that happens, you know you have what you ask. It is the will of God.
It is not that you and I agree to agree and therefore can get the Lord into a corner and make Him do what He does not want to do. Rather, as we pray spontaneously by the Spirit of God, there bubbles up from within us a harmony.
Have you ever had that experience in a prayer meeting? Excuse me getting excited about it; I always do get excited about this. I find it thrilling.
Instead of those dead, boring prayer meetings where we destroy effectiveness by so many bad habits, here we are in the Lord’s presence. The Holy Spirit is leading us, and the anointing is upon the whole time.
Someone prays, and as they pray, something is kindled in somebody else, and they pray. Then you have a burden to pray, but before you can pray, someone else begins, and they pray the very thing you were going to pray.
Have you ever had that experience? You almost feel, “They have stolen my lines.” But there is every need for you to pray it too, for in the mouth of two or three witnesses the thing is established. Then we know: here is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Now, am I going too fast for you? Here is the Head: the Lord Jesus. Here is the body: we who are saved. And here is the Holy Spirit.
How is the mind of the Head communicated to the members of the body? The Head is at the right hand of the Father and ever lives to make intercession for us there, while we, members of the body, are on earth.
How are the mind, purpose, and will of the Head communicated to the members of the body? By the Holy Spirit. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to take what is on the mind of the Head and make it real to the members of the body.
This transforms prayer. Suddenly prayer does not become a liturgical or religious exercise. It becomes a place of power, a command centre in warfare, a place of revelation, and a place for discerning the will of God in any given matter—personal, local, national, or international.
So often, in the place of prayer, revelation is given concerning situations about which we are totally baffled. It is an amazing thing.
This is co-working together with the Lord. I read that marvellous passage in Isaiah 62. Who is speaking in Isaiah 62 when He says, “For Zion’s sake I will not hold My peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest”?
It is the One of Whom it is spoken in Isaiah 61:1:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me;
because the Lord hath anointed Me
to preach good tidings unto the meek;
He hath sent Me to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all that mourn.
It is the Lord Jesus; it is the Messiah. So here is the Messiah saying, “For Zion’s sake I will not hold My peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest.”
But then we suddenly find the Messiah speaking again in Verse 6: “I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem; they shall never hold their peace.” He has just said, “I will not hold My peace.” Now He says, “They will not hold their peace.”
“Ye that are the Lord’s remembrancers, take ye no rest, and give Him no rest till He do this thing.” Is that not a beautiful translation—“Ye that are the Lord’s remembrancers”?
Immediately one has a problem here. I do not know whether you do, but I do. If the Lord has said, “For Zion’s sake I will not hold My peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest until her righteousness go forth as brightness, and her salvation as a lamp that burneth,” why should I have to hold my peace? Why should I have no rest?
If it is the Lord Who has already beaten all the powers of darkness and has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, it is going to be done, come what may. So I can sit down and do nothing.
But then I suddenly find the Lord saying, “Church, wait. I have set you as watchmen upon the walls of Jerusalem. You shall take no rest. You shall not hold your peace day nor night.”
“You are My remembrancers.” Oh, you say, “Do You mean to say the Lord might forget? Is He forgetful? Has He got so old that He has Alzheimer’s? Does He have to be reminded?”
What is the Lord meaning by this? Is this not an amazing passage? It is almost as if the Lord is saying, “Of course, I can do all this alone, but I do not want to.”
That brings me to my next point this afternoon: the mystery of true intercession. No one will ever become an intercessor until he or she faces the mystery of intercession.
Why, if the Lord is all-powerful, if with the Lord nothing is impossible, if He could create the whole universe without us, and if He could create man without us, does He want us to be in on this thing? Why do we need to be the Lord’s remembrancers?
Prayer is a pouring out. That is what it is in Greek: just a pouring out.
Amy Carmichael said there are three ways the Lord answers simple prayer. “Ye have not, because ye ask not.” So you ask the Lord. The Lord can say yes, the Lord can say no, and the Lord can say wait.
But when we come to intercession, we are dealing with something else. Listen to me carefully: this is not a hit-and-miss affair. It is not like general prayer, where you can ask but the Lord may say no.
It is always best to ask the Lord. I do not understand people who get all pious about this and say, “Well, I will not ask the Lord, because maybe it is not right.” Why not ask Him? There is no harm in asking.
C. T. Studd said, “Why ask the Lord for an egg if you can ask Him for an elephant?” You might as well ask. The Lord will only say, “No, you cannot have that,” or, “Wait.” It is always better to ask.
But intercession is not a question of hit and miss. Intercession begins with an understanding, a discerning, however dimly, of what the will of God is—for a nation, for the church, for the nations, or for any given situation right down to an individual person.
Then you begin to understand. Dimly, you begin to see what the will of God is. Then, by the Spirit of the Lord, you can stand with the Lord for the fulfilment of that purpose.
This, I believe, is very important indeed. It is, to put it simply, the praying into being of God’s will.
But why do we need to pray into being God’s will? Surely God can fulfil His will and purpose without us. Yes, my dear friend, not only can He fulfil His purpose without you and me, but He can fulfil it far more easily and cleanly without you and me.
We are always the problem. Once we get in on the act, the whole thing becomes difficult, even for the Lord, if you understand what I mean. We mess things up. We get our flesh into it. We frustrate things.
Thus, you see, there is the need of supplication. You remember: “supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings.” It is interesting how supplication is again and again linked with prayer.
Supplication simply means a beseeching appeal. It is an appeal normally made to the emperor, or to whoever is in authority. It can be an appeal about a thousand and one things.
I always like to think of supplication as an enquiring appeal. It is to ask the Lord from the heart, “How do we handle this situation? How do we pray?” That is why it comes first.
You cannot have intercession without supplication. The first thing is to supplicate the Lord, to call upon the Lord, to appeal to the Lord, to enquire of the Lord. Then, when He gives you a beginning of clarity, real intercession can begin.
The best example, of course, as we mentioned yesterday afternoon, is Daniel. The Lord had already said to the prophet Jeremiah that there would be only seventy years of captivity.
Why then did the Lord call Daniel to pray as if everything depended upon his prayer? The Lord had already spoken through a prophet seventy, eighty, or ninety years earlier that the captivity would last seventy years, and then it would be over.
Why did the Lord call Daniel to prayer? Why was this burden put into Daniel’s heart? Why did it nearly cost Daniel his life? The king had made an order: no prayer.
Daniel remembered the stipulation that King Solomon had made: if you pray toward the place where I have caused My name to dwell and confess your sins, then will I hear you. If you are in exile, I will draw you from the ends of the earth back to this land that I have given you.
So Daniel was opening the shutters of his window as a concrete expression of his faith. He was opening the windows not toward the north, not toward the south, not toward the east, but toward the west—toward Jerusalem.
He was standing on the Word of God. And the enemy prepared a lion’s den for him.
Daniel knew very well that there were enemies all around him, waiting to trip him up and destroy him. He knew there were forces of darkness and powers of evil seeking to liquidate him, his ministry, and his friends.
You know the story. You know how he went to the lions’ den right in the middle of his prayer ministry, and how the Lord shut the mouths of the lions. He came out of the lions’ den and went on with his prayer ministry until the Lord brought the decree that the people of God were allowed to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the city, the cities of the land, and the house of God.
Why did the Lord need Daniel? Could He not have done it without Daniel? Of course, He could have done it without Daniel. Then why did Daniel have to go through all that fasting and prayer, putting ashes on his head, confessing the sins of the people, and appealing to the Lord to have mercy?
Here we make the most tremendous discovery about intercession: in grace, the Lord wants us to be with Him in the fulfilment of His purpose. And it is more than that—it is a question of training for eternal service.
We give the Lord so much trouble, but He puts up with it. Why? Because He understands that we are so blind, so unbalanced, and that we do not see things as we ought to see them.
But He puts up with it all because, little by little, He will train us, instruct us, get us into prayer, and teach us.
Why does the Lord persevere with us in this question of intercession? He is training us to be alive to Himself. He is training us to hear Him and see Him with the eyes of the heart.
Again and again in the Book of Revelation it says, “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith.” There are very few children of God who are truly hearing what the Spirit is saying to the churches in our day. Very few.
Most of us are just caught up in a routine. We do not really hear what the Lord is saying.
The whole question of intercession is not that we have some concrete, cast-iron concept of how the Lord is going to do things in the future, exactly where and how. Rather, we are moving with the Lord. We are hearing the Lord.
Where there are dangers, we hear the dangers. They come into our hearts as burdens. I cannot explain it any other way. Intercession trains us to be alive to the Lord, to be alert, to watch—not to sleep.
Then there is discernment. How few people can discern the will of God. I get more questions from young people about what the will of God is for their life than anything else.
I always say the same thing: learn first what is the will of God in general terms for us all in our day and generation. Then perhaps you will begin to understand a good deal more about the will of God for your personal life.
We all have problems with the will of the Lord, but in intercession we learn to discern what is the will of God. We make many mistakes in this matter, but as we go along, we learn how to discern what is the Lord, what is ourselves, and what is the enemy.
Then again, intercession trains us to function under His government. The Lord does not stand still in intercession. First we use one weapon in the Word of God, and then He will move us to something else.
To learn how to function is very important. To learn to use the sword of the Spirit is part of the training in intercession.
Of course, the whole Word of God is the sword of the Spirit. But I believe that the way it is put in Ephesians 6 means that the Holy Spirit takes some part of the Word—some statement, some promise, something in the Word—and applies it to a given situation.
It may be a national situation. Then that Word becomes the sword of the Spirit in the hand of the church at that time in prayer. We have to learn how to use that.
The Lord also trains us to experience the discipline of fellowship. It is one thing to pray on our own; it is another thing to pray together.
Most people, when they pray together, pray as if they are on their own. That is one reason why our prayer times are so heavy and wooden.
We go into them as if there is nobody else there—only me and the Lord. Then, when we finally get our mouth open and pray, we forget everybody else, and it is just the Lord and me.
Well, you might as well go home and pray. The whole point about being together is that we are together. It is a discipline to be together in prayer. We have to learn when to pray and when to stop.
I would like to move to a third thing that I would underline this afternoon: what does it mean to pray in the Spirit?
In Ephesians 6 you will find these wonderful words:
With all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit,
and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints.
What does it mean to pray in the Spirit? The apostle says, not praying now and again when the Lord touches you and lifts you up, as it were, to some exalted height, but praying at all seasons in the Spirit.
It means that real intercession is always in the realm of the Holy Spirit, under the government of the Holy Spirit, under the leading of the Holy Spirit. It is initiated, or conceived, by the Holy Spirit. He enables us to follow it through, and He brings it to completion.
In other words, it is under the sovereign leadership of the Holy Spirit. That is praying in the Spirit.
Some people think that praying in the Spirit is praying in tongues. I have no problem with tongues at all, but praying in the Spirit may include the gift of tongues; it is not synonymous with speaking in tongues.
Many people say, “Praying in the Spirit means that I just pray in a tongue. I do not know what I am saying, but the Lord knows what I am saying, and that is all that matters.” Well, praise the Lord for that.
But praying in the Spirit is far more than praying in a tongue. It means that the Holy Spirit is burdening you, leading you, supervising this intercession, and enabling you to go on until it is fulfilled.
Another term for the Holy Spirit is anointing, in one sense. The Holy Spirit is the Person; He is the One Who anoints. The Lord Jesus anoints, but it is the Holy Spirit Who makes it a living reality.
In a prayer meeting, have you ever noticed that we may start very well? Someone prays well. One of the brothers prays in a good, strong voice, and we can all hear him. Then we get lost.
Someone prays for something completely unrelated, then another person prays for an aunt with a gangrenous toe, then someone else prays for someone at death’s door, and suddenly we do not know where we are.
Then all of a sudden some dear sister stands up and prays, and immediately the whole time comes back on course—immediately, right back on course, on the centre. It had gone off-centre; now it is back on-centre. It is the anointing.
Have you ever been in a prayer meeting like that? I feel sorry for anyone who has not. It is exciting. You can endure the boredom and confusion of the other just to see what the Lord can do when the anointing comes back.
When this person prays in the anointing, it is almost as if the whole temperature of the prayer meeting goes up, and you are in heaven again—waiting for someone else to put it down to earth.
If the anointing that is upon that one is followed by others and taken through, we follow the anointing through the whole time. The whole prayer meeting can be kept in light and in the centre of God’s design and will for that time.
That is what it is to pray in the Spirit at all seasons. It is not that we all come with our own little burden and merely verbalise whatever it is we brought.
One prays for Nepal, one for Japan, one for London, one for Washington, one for Bill Clinton, one for Hillary Clinton, another for China—it is all over the place. Do you understand what I mean?
When you go out of a prayer meeting like that, you almost have to say to yourself, “God does answer prayer; I believe God answers prayer,” because something deep within you is telling you that the Lord did not hear much of that. It never went beyond the ceiling.
It was a religious exercise, that is all. It was not real prayer in the Spirit; it was prayer out of the spirit.
Hindus can pray out of the spirit. Buddhists can pray out of the spirit. Muslims can pray out of the spirit. Christians can pray out of the spirit if it is a religious exercise.
But if you have had this experience, you know what I am talking about. Suddenly there is the anointing. There is the anointing. Now we must follow that anointing.
That dear one has hit the nail on the head by the Holy Spirit’s government and enabling. Now we can either follow it through or let it go.
We have to learn how to follow it, and we have to learn when the Lord has finished with that particular subject. Maybe one or two people pray along that line; then we go further, and it is as if the Lord moves and the direction changes.
If we follow the anointing in a prayer meeting, the prayer meeting becomes a powerful time. Local matters are touched, personal matters are touched, and sometimes even national and international matters are touched.
The principle of corporate intercession and prayer is togetherness. It is very simple, but so often in our prayer times it is anything but that.
Some of you have heard me talk about the problems in corporate prayer, and I will simply enumerate them. The first is long prayer.
Nothing can kill a prayer meeting more than long prayer. A person gets up and prays for ten minutes in a corporate prayer meeting when we are only there for one hour.
I do not care who you are, and I do not care who the person is who prays for ten minutes: you cannot go with them. You lose the thread. You cannot do it.
Corporate prayer is not one person praying for ten minutes, another for thirty minutes, another for five minutes, and another for ten. Corporate prayer may sometimes be very short prayer, and you may pray three, four, or five times.
But long prayer is a terrible business, and it confuses the whole prayer time. Some people are so nervous that when they finally open their mouth, they feel that every single burden they have carried for the last month has got to come out.
They begin in the anointing, then they add, and add, and add, and so go down, and down, and down, until the temperature has hit bottom. It is nearly icy.
Then we have another problem: faint prayer. It is amazing to me. In a prayer meeting, one person puts their head right into the cushion, and nobody in the world can hear them.
Of course, the Lord understands, but we are supposed to say amen. How can I say amen when I cannot hear? I do not know where they are or what they are praying.
You only have to have five of those prayers and the prayer meeting is destroyed.
Then it is very strange: some men who have voices like foghorns normally, when they pray become, “Oh, Lord…” as if they are the sweetest, humblest little lady in the whole meeting. What is wrong with these men? Why do they not stand up and pray? Do they feel they are not justified in the presence of God?
The whole point of corporate prayer is that I should hear you. That is the point. I have to be able to say amen.
Never say “Amen” merely because you are trying to help somebody who is so nervous that they have whispered the whole prayer. When they finish, do not just say, “Amen.” You do not know what you are saying amen to.
Then, of course, we have sermonising—people who preach a whole message in prayer, almost with three points all beginning with the same letter. You know the kind of thing: a little seminar, perhaps a paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount or something in Ephesians or Obadiah.
It is tremendous to bring the Word of God and to stand upon the Word of God when the Holy Spirit is making it His sword in a particular matter. It is great. It is wonderful to be Bible-based in our prayer.
But when we are preaching at the Lord, an artificiality comes into the prayer meeting, and it is death. Whenever death or deadness touches the people of God, defilement comes.
That is why all the priests were never allowed to touch anything that was dead in their service. It is very important to understand this.
Then we have horizontal prayer. Horizontal prayer is for public attention, not divine attention. It is for public consumption, not divine attention.
In other words, someone prays, “Dear Lord, I want to pray for Mrs. Lee. She lives in block so-and-so, number so-and-so, in such-and-such a place. Her husband is a drunkard; she has two sons in prison; she has a daughter who is a delinquent; and, Lord, You know that tomorrow she is going to such-and-such a place.”
What is all this? Do we have the idea that the Lord might bless and save the wrong Mrs. Lee?
Why are we praying like this? My dear friends, listen carefully to me: we are prostituting the time of prayer for horizontal information. We are giving information to the other brothers and sisters. It is not prayer.
Sometimes horizontal prayer is all to do with theology. Someone is ill, and one person gets up and says, “Lord, You have got to heal so-and-so because it is in the atonement, and by Your stripes we are healed.” Then immediately somebody else gets up and says, “Lord, we cannot tell You what to do. You may have a purpose in suffering.”
This is horizontal prayer. We are turning the guns on each other. It destroys the whole prayer time. Instead of being an effective ministry of prayer, it becomes a question of horizontal information and even trying to influence one another.
Then we have shopping-list prayer. This means that every single matter mentioned for prayer has to be covered by one person in one prayer. They start with each matter and go right through the whole thing.
If you have five of those shopping-list prayers, you are finished. One starts all the way down the line, then another one starts all the way down the line, then another one starts all the way down the line.
Then there are what I call world-tour prayers, where we start in Richmond, Virginia, go to Los Angeles, cross to Hong Kong, arrive in Beijing, then Moscow, London, Rome, and finally back to Richmond, Virginia. It is a world tour.
The problem is that you cannot feel any sense of anointing in such a prayer time. These are the problems we have in prayer, are they not?
Left to ourselves, we destroy any time of prayer simply by not learning the simple lesson that the principle of corporate prayer is togetherness.
Let me add one other problem: mechanical noise. This is the kind of thing we have when someone says, “Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.”
It becomes like a little mantra, like a Buddhist mantra. It is ridiculous—quite ridiculous.
I once was in a prayer meeting and heard a man groaning. I thought he was terribly ill. The pastor bent across to me and said, “Are you worried about our brother?”
“Well,” I said, “is he all right?”
He said, “Yes, yes, yes. He has the ministry of groaning.”
The ministry of groaning! I had never heard of such a thing. I know that there are prayers trapped within you which cannot even be uttered. That is true.
But, dear friends, we have to be very careful of all this kind of thing, because it destroys the effectiveness of prayer.
When we pray in the Spirit, we are cleansed of this kind of thing. We are purged of it, if you like. When we know the anointing in the prayer time and learn how to stay with the anointing, the whole prayer time becomes a powerhouse. It becomes a thrilling place.
I must finish, I think; our time is fast going. But I want finally to speak about a matter that I believe is as important as anything else that I could say about prayer in these two sessions. It is the principle of travail.
There can be no life without birth, and there can be no birth without travail.
In Galatians, Chapter 4, the apostle Paul opens a little window into his own experience. He says this in Verse 19:
My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you.
I think this is a window into the heart of this dear servant of God which reveals something, sadly, very, very rare amongst the people of God.
Notice that the apostle Paul says, “My little children, of whom I am again in travail.” He uses the word in Greek for the anguish, agony, and pain of childbirth.
There could be no stronger term that the apostle uses than this term. What a window this is into his heart.
In another place he says, “You may have ten thousand teachers; you have only one father.” He was speaking of himself. “I begat you,” he said, “in the gospel.”
Notice another amazing thing. He says, “My little children, of whom I am again in travail.” That means he had been earlier in travail. Now he is back again in travail for the same people.
He calls them little children. Before they were unsaved people, and he apparently was in the anguish of spiritual travail—spiritual childbirth—that they might find the Lord and come to the Lord.
Now he calls them little children and says, “My little children, of whom I am again in travail, until Christ be fully formed in you.”
Do you think sometimes that the reason the Lord does not add to us in salvation is that there is no travail?
Let me ask it again. Do you think that the reason the Lord does not multiply us and add to us, as it was in the early days—daily those that should be saved—is because there is no travail?
Now let me ask you another question, especially you who have responsibility for the people of God. Do you think that the reason many do not grow up is because there is no ministry of travail?
Beloved brothers and sisters, please listen to me. You can preach the gospel until you are blue in the face, and no one will necessarily be saved. Somewhere there has to be a travail.
You can teach those who are saved, and teach and teach and teach, and it all goes into the head, and there is no development. Christ is not fully formed in them.
It is all up here. People are clear on doctrine and clear on truth; they can give dissertations and outlines on the truth. They have heard it so often and been taught so well.
But in the end, it is the development of their spiritual character and life. Travail is a principle in the work of God.
There are not so many who are called to such a ministry. But this principle lies at the heart of the church, at the heart of God’s work, and at the heart of the development of spiritual character in believers.
I think if nothing else happened from these two sessions, but that God were to take hold of one or two of you, dear ones, and call you to such a ministry of travail, it would be well worth it.
I thank God for people who prayed for me over years, when I was, as you can see, a very irreverent person. I have always had an enormous sense of humour.
I remember my old history teacher at college saying, “You will never make it amongst those Christian people.”
“Why?” I said.
“You have too great a sense of humour,” he said. “They are humourless.”
I remember Norman Grubb and his wife in the China Inland Mission. When I was first saved, I had a ministry of correspondence with them. I used to ask them all the questions I could not get answered in the church I was in.
I was known in the church as “Jack Want-to-Know.” All the time, I wanted to know this and wanted to know that. So I used to write to them, and I used to get letters back. Poor things, I had no idea how busy they were.
I can imagine them receiving letters from a thirteen-year-old boy asking all kinds of things: “Why do we meet on Sunday and not Saturday? Why do we have church membership? I cannot find it in the New Testament. What does it mean to be given the right hand of fellowship? Why is it not the left hand?”
All these silly questions that I used to ask these poor busy workers in the work of the Lord.
But the interesting thing is that, basically, in the end, it is whether people pray for you.
I was blessed by two or three people who, behind the scenes—I only knew years later—travailed for me, that God would take hold of me and bring me through all my irreverence and everything else, and somehow persevere with me until I fulfilled a ministry.
Auntie Kathleen and Auntie Alexander of Portslade were two of them. To the day they died—one of them at eighty-nine and the other at ninety-three—they prayed every day for me. And boy, did they pray.
Then there was that amazing old sister who lived to be one hundred and two years of age. That shows you how difficult I am; the Lord kept her down here until she was one hundred and two.
I am speaking of Sophia Jørgensen of Denmark. Oh, how she prayed.
Where are these prayer warriors? Where are these ones who are prepared to lay down their lives without anybody knowing, behind the scenes? They labour in prayer and become, as I believe Brother Oliphant once said, “a womb for the church.”
Where are they? No wonder we all labour under such heaviness and woodenness, and feel that somehow we are often getting nowhere. We need this ministry of travail.
This kind of ministry cannot be worked up. It is not emotional, and it is not something that you hear a message like this and think, “I must do it. I must be this.”
It is something that the Holy Spirit has to put into your heart, and you cannot get away from it. It is burdens that are conceived by the Holy Spirit in your spirit.
Once they are conceived in your spirit, there is no way for them to come out except by a spiritual birth. It is travail. No other way.
When I think of Romans, Chapter 8, and what the apostle Paul says in speaking about this matter:
In like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity:
for we know not how to pray as we ought;
but the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us
with groanings which cannot be uttered;
and He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit,
because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.
This kind of prayer is the most special kind of prayer of all. It is like an iceberg: nine-tenths of it are unseen.
The one-tenth that comes out in words is the smallest portion of all. It is trapped within the spirit, and yet it is a ministry of the Holy Spirit in our spirit.
We may feel relief when we can pour out something in poor words, but somehow we feel relief only to discover that the burden is back there again within a day, as strong as ever.
Dear child of God, this is a tremendous ministry, this ministry of travail. It has been my privilege to know one or two who have had this ministry in their life.
Oh, would to God there were more candidates. How are we going to go through these last days? How are we going to see the house of God built? How are we going to see it come to the place where the top stone can be brought forth with shouts of “Grace, grace unto it”?
Unless there are those who have this travailing ministry, how will it happen? Is the Lord speaking to you on this thing?
Now let me say something else. Please listen to me. For some reason, men seem to think that women are the ones for this ministry.
It is perfectly true that in the Word of God it says that those who are widows should give themselves to prayer. That is absolutely true. I would never despise the prayer of those sisters.
I think my life has been circumscribed by the prayers of praying older sisters. I thank God for them.
But, my dear friends, there is no excuse for men not being in the forefront of this battle.
Sometimes people say to me, “Oh, the sisters are so strong.” Of course, if the men are weak, what can the sisters be? Are they meant to become weak in order not to show up the men?
When men are strong in the Lord, sisters can be strong in the Lord as well.
The work of the Lord has fallen on hard days. There are so few men in the forefront of the work of God.
We need men in prayer times—men who will be the covering of the home, men who will take their stand in the Lord Jesus, in the Messiah, and be able, as it were, to pinpoint and pioneer the way.
Do not get me wrong on this. I am not saying that the sisters’ ministry is second-class or second-rate—far from it.
What I wish with all my heart is that men would take their place as good soldiers of the Lord Jesus and not leave it to the poor sisters to be good soldiers of the Lord Jesus.
So often prayer meetings are filled with sisters. Well, thank God for that; they will get their reward. But where are the men?
If God is speaking to your heart, commit yourself to the Lord, whoever you are. If the Lord is speaking to some brothers here, and you find prayer very difficult, just ask the Lord to start to train you, to teach you.
Take your place. I speak to you younger brothers as well, not just to older brothers. You younger brothers, you have got to take over if the Lord tarries.
You are going to live in one of the most difficult periods of history—not only one of the most difficult periods, full of pressure for the people of God, but one of the most exciting periods of history.
We need not men who merely have knowledge of the Word; we need men who are prayer-wise.
We need men who can lead the people of God into battle; men who can lead the people of God into discerning what is the will and mind of the Lord in any given situation; men who can be a covering for the turning of the key in the lock, or the unlocking of the lock.
We need men and women.
May God take these two times and write something on your heart.
I have often thought that the United States of North America could become the scene of one of the greatest awakenings and revivals in the history of the church.
I do not mean that everything will be wonderful. No, I think hand in hand with enormous pressures, enormous breakdown, troubling government, and collapse in morality and ethics nationally, it could still be that in North America God could do something in His people and save multitudes of the unsaved.
It was Matthew Henry who said, “When God is ever going to do something, He first sets His people to pray.”
May the Lord touch your heart. If you have felt the Lord speaking to you in one way or another through these two sessions on prayer, respond to the Lord.
Remember that old Chinese saying: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
If you are ready to take the first step, the Lord will lead you before long to take the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. This journey will end in the service of God.
May the Lord touch your heart and speak to you, whoever you are, however young you are, however recently you found the Lord. May the Lord touch your heart and challenge you.
Shall we pray?
Let us have a moment of quietness. In this quietness, let us respond to the Lord.
Maybe there are some who need the eyes of their hearts opened to see that we live in a spiritual world. Ask the Lord to open the eyes of your heart.
Maybe there are others, especially some of the brothers, who have not been much in the forefront of prayer. You feel somehow convicted and challenged. Commit yourself to the Lord. He will lead you and enable you.
Maybe there are some young people here who have felt that all this is for older people. Maybe the Lord has spoken to you. Commit yourself to Him Who is your Lord and your Saviour. He will lead you, instruct you, and teach you.
Maybe there are some who feel the Lord has challenged them about intercession. Commit yourself to Him, even if you think you are poor material. Commit yourself to Him.
And lastly, maybe there are some who feel the Lord is speaking to them about this ministry of travail—so unseen, so hidden. Commit yourself to the Lord.
Beloved Lord, You know every one of our hearts. You know, Lord, we are all unprofitable servants.
Lord, have mercy upon us. For You have saved us, and You have persevered with us. Your faithfulness, Your steadfast love, is something that overwhelms us.
Lord, we pray this day: You Who have heard the response of every heart, will You undertake our instruction, our education, our training, and our discipline.
Do it, Lord, for the sake of Your church and for the sake of Your purpose in the nations. Do it, Lord.
And we shall give You all the praise and all the glory, for we ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.